I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Fit of the Week: PvE and Mission Gila

I've been doing a lot of PvP fits lately. Let's go with something for PvE:

I bought one of my alts one of these recently to act as a tank ship for medium-level complexes in low-sec and null-sec. And I have to say that I've been really pleased with the performance. It's a variation on the PvE Ishtar fit I posted at the beginning of the year. But it has a lot of advantages over that ship.

The main disadvantage over the Ishtar is that fit in this way, the Gila doesn't do quite as much damage with Sentries, about 540 instead of 580. In every other way, the Gila is superior. In particular, the larger drone bay means that the Gila can be much more versatile than the Ishtar. The afterburner -- I actually bought a faction one -- allows this ship to dive into heavy opposition and drop Heavy Combat drones instead, if desired. The afterburner also assists with the tank in the same manner as the Ishtar fits.

The biggest advantage of the PvE Gila, though, is the tank. This ship is capable of soloing virtually any L4 as long as you play carefully. The tank is also tunable, thanks to the extra mid slot available in the Gila. Stick with the meta 4 Shield Power Relays: they're just as effective as the T2 versions and have easier fitting requirements.

EDIT (4/May/2012): I forgot to mention one other huge advantage the Gila has over the Ishtar. The Gila doesn't require HAC V to get its full damage potential, which most mission-runners don't have.

Like the Ishtar, it doesn't much matter what weapons you fit. Unfortunately, the Gila doesn't have very impressive CPU. As a result, if you fit for this tank, you'll be limited to light weapons. Still, in a PvE scenario, this is no particular disadvantage: you can concentrate your Sentries or Heavies on the bigger rats while you take out the tackle with the light weapons of your choice. If you fully take advantage of the Gila's speed, you can remove the Drone Link Augmentor and use the CPU savings to load up on more or heavier weapons. Dialing back one or both LSEs to meta 4 will also help, if you like. The Gila would be particularly good ratting against Guristas, by the way, thanks to its high sensor strength.

Finally, also like the Ishtar, the Gila benefits from a quick align speed. The tough tank and that speed will allow you to slip through many gate-camps. The align speed will allow you to warp off if you suspect you're being hunted in low- or null. It's also a pretty good idea to trade out some of the damage drones for a flight or two of ECM drones if you're going to take this boat out of high-sec.

Fit like this, I've had very good luck warping into static sites, drawing aggro with a gun or a rocket attack, and then dropping Sentries. I can then burn well away from the beacon and tank the site while using the Sentries for DPS. If desired (and I often do), I can then warp in a fast glass cannon (read: tier 3 BC) to provide DPS to clear the site quickly while the Gila tanks it.

Anyway, kind of a specialized ship and specialized fit, but if you have the skills for it, it handles this mission quite well!

Fly sneaky!

All Fits of the Week are intended as general guidelines only. You may not have the skills needed for this exact fit. If you do not, feel free to adjust the fit to suit to meet your skills, including using meta 3 guns and "best named" defenses and e-war. Ships can also be adjusted to use faction or dead-space modules depending on the budget of the pilot flying it. Each FOTW is intended as a general guide to introduce you to concepts that will help you fit and to fly that particular type of ship more aggressively and well.

I have been using Gila as a plex-tanker for a long time now, and can only say its one of the best ships for the job. for the DED rated plexes in null, i use a variation on this one, essentially pure tank in rigs, lows and mediums, even without the AB. You can just put it in the pocket, aproach another gate, put out ogre IIs for 500 DPS and go forward and kill stuff on your main. When you have the room cleared, gila is on the other gate :)

Without the AB, gila is VERY slow, lets say about 210m/s. But, with the relays in lows (and I use 4 for greater tank + 3 purgers) you kinda dont have the cap for the AB to run permanently, not even close to that. plus, if you can fit in three hardener to the mediums and that can be a solid cap-drainer in heavy DPS situations.

Until recently, NPCs only had a chance of using their EWAR. That is to say, if an NPC was capable of using a webifier, I might not actually use the webifier (in missions with Angel Webifiers, they will often not actually webify you). If the NPC was capable of using a neut, it might not actually use the neut. Different NPCs have different chance-to-use-ability. I'm guessing this is because the original PvE designers didn't want to wipe pilots out of space too easily (which is another way of saying "the designers were soft").

So those NPCs that use ECM had a chance-to-use-ECM. The catch here is that ECM is also a chance based action: if you use ECM (i.e.: "Jam the target") there is only a chance that the ECM will actually set the target's maximum targets to 0.

Now go back through the various messages posted on the forums, and you can understand what the GMs were on about: NPCs have a fixed chance to JAM (i.e.: use their ECM Target Jamming ability).

What players found over the years was that your sensor strength does indeed impact the chance for ECM to set your maximum targets to 0. Others countered by saying that the GMs reported "fixed chance to jam". But the numbers and logs collected from people indicate otherwise: of the times that NPCs actually tried to jam you, your sensor strength actually did have an impact. There was no conclusive way of measuring how many times they should have tried jamming you of course, but the evidence appeared to indicate that the NPCs were not continually trying to Jam (i.e.: they didn't have their ECM modules on auto-repeat, and only activated them on occasion).

Now that ECM-using NPCs will continually try to use their ECM, we're back the familiar territory of "random chance to clear your locked targets and stop you targeting anything for 20 seconds". As opposed to "random chance to actually try jamming you".

Clear as mud?

TL;DR: Yes, your sensor strength does impact the probability that an attempt by a Guristas NPC to ECM target jam you will succeed or fail.

1) The Ishtar is both more agile and faster than the Gila. You should be getting almost 614m/s on that Ishtar where the Gila should be lingering at 560. Not sure why you think the Gila is more capable of "Swooping" in to drop closer range drones. The extra 25m3 extra space is hardly an inhibiter.

2) Here's the big one. Your ishtar post has plenty of room for weapons. And not just small ones. You can fit all 3 heavy Electrons II on that ishtar fit. So, your DPS difference should actually be much larger. A mission ishtar should be doing over 600. With those blasters, you should have 683. Big difference.

Ishtars speed and damage should make up for the lack of tank when compared to the Gila. But then again, the point of PVE is to it faster. The Ishtar has porven to be more effecient in this respect.

And last one: You should be able to get Standard Missile Launchers IIs in there. You'll cut 10DPS, but you'll change your range from 10 to 63. So, I think you'll get that 10DPS back just in range. Plus I don't know if the GILA's bonus works on rockets. I know it works on standard though.

For hi-sec use, I found I got better performance with a fourth SPR over the DC II. This gets more pronounced if you mission-tank it, as the DC II omni-tank benefit is wasted. Also ran with 3 purgers over 2+sentry boost - found sentry boost wasn't worth the recharge loss.

Again in hi-sec L4's, had good results dropping the AB and active hardeners for twin faction resistance amplifiers and a single mission specific T2 hardener (50mil of res amps is not unreasonable on a 100+ mil hull). Once that is done, can fit meta heavy launchers.

Combined with small sig, happily tanked entire room of Guristas BS and BC using mostly Garde IIs. Provoke, one-shot frigs with sentry drones, two-shot cruisers and BCs, and then lead the BS a merry chace while the sentries take them apart.

I think the arguments to fly this over an Ishtar are pretty weak. The MAR or dual MAR Ishtar does everything better except deal with neuts, and if you're expecting those, then the passive shield Ishtar does adequately. The drone bay size isn't a valid argument in my eyes - neither has a Myrmidon-size drone bay, and you can switch at station if yo're running missions, or if you're exploring then you know what drone type to bring.

Easily tanks C2s, could easily tank C3s with t2 rigs. All passive for no neut issues. If going solo after Inferno (salvage drones) you can drop a missile launcher for a t2 tractor beam and a probe launcher.

I disagree with that assertion. HAC only affects l/m/h drone range by 5km per level, and gives you 50 m3 more drone bay space per level. The actual drone damage is based off Gallente Cruiser skill, same as the Gila. As we already covered, the drone bay size is no limitation for missioners at HAC4, and using l/m/h drones at 80km is kind of silly anyways.

I'm flying an ishtar, and training for the Gila. A lot of it boils down to what you're doing. I see neuts in all of my PVE, which really warps things, but more or less the Ishtar ends up with a lot of large shield extenders and lower resists because having a larger buffer for regen works better on it than trying to stack passive resist modules. This leaves room for only 150mm rails -- great for picking off frigates while your drones focus on cruisers on up, but fairly anemic in DPS. The Gila can be fit with a superior passive tank *and* get better damage from heavy missiles at its maximum lock range.

Running missions I imagine they'd come out about identically thanks to neither being able to fit more than two sentry damage rigs, and the low DPS of missions in general. Many other ships beat out the drone cruisers though, thanks to wonky drone aggro issues in about half the level IVs.

Gilas are becoming popular as "drone bunnies" in high-end incursion sites. The job of the drone bunny is to have all the drones available from the player BSs in the site assigned to him or her and this ship attacks the site's frigates.

As a result, the Gila's drone bay space is pretty much wasted since you're just using an endless swarm of Hobs and Warriors. But the lock time, small sig, and tank of the ship is what sells it for this role. However, once the fleet gets to the end of two of the HQ sites, the Gila can launch heavies to provide DPS for that.

Sentry drones are not at all popular in incursion sites because the fleet will be constantly moving from one anchor site to the next.

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